Will this start an age of buying powerful gpus for lower tier machines?WELL ... yes and no... that is there MAY be some games out there that are written to take advantage of this and place a CPU essentially at idle with the video card doing all the work, but if playing older games that are written not to take advantage of this, you will find that the CPU would be quite busy to play the games and so you would want to not be running a Intel Atom or Celeron or low end weak AMD CPU.

I think the best example of this is the game Unreal Tournament 99. It was written back when most people had single core computers and many people were running with integrated graphics because the integrated graphics were plenty to play it. As I learned later when playing this game on newer hardware, it did not take too well to multicore CPU's such as my AMD Quadcore. And so I had to specify CPU Affinity to use a single core of the 4 that are available to get the game to run correctly.

Playing UT99 on this newer computer with overkill video card for UT99, the CPU would get busy and you would probably ALSO have to specify core affinity to get the game to run properly, however it seems as though the AMD CPU's are more prone to this problem with UT99 vs Intel for some REASON. * Also UT99 seems to peg the core to nearly 100% while running no matter how powerful of a multicore AMD CPU you are running. I tried this out on these AMD CPU's and all have had issues without affinity set ( Athlon II x4 620 2600Mhz, Athlon II x2 215 2700Mhz, Athlon 64 x2 4450B 2300Mhz, and Sempron x2 2200 2.0Ghz ) all of which acted up without affinity set with core usage bouncing imbalanced erratic and the game performance acting glitchy with frame lags etc even with  nVidia and ATI video cards.

Oddly testing with Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz 4MB Cache and Pentium E5400 2700Mhz core affinity does not need to be set to run correctly, but the game makes these CPU's run at about 60% for both cores.

This game UT99 is very CPU dependent vs GPU dependent. And so the video card would be essentially idle pretty much in rendering the simplicities of this game, mainly because the game was engineered to be more cpu dependent especially with software graphics rendering if not using a system with a good GPU to tap into. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rendering


This link below is pretty good on explaining how it came to be etc for Mantle Multicore in relation to PS3 etc
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/63428-closer-look-amds-mantle.html